Samsung Offers Peek At Tizen Software

Software developers in Seoul got a glimpse of Samsung Electronics Co.'s Tizen operating software for mobile devices this week, with one of the developers showing off apps that are meant to compete with similar versions on Android and iOS.

A mobile phone running the Tizen OS.

Min-Jeong Lee/The Wall Street Journal

The launch of a Tizen phone had initially been anticipated as early as the third quarter of this year, but the release has apparently been pushed back to next year, according to developers. Reasons for the delay remain unclear. Samsung declined to comment on any specific plans related to Tizen, which will be entering the field as a distant third to the two dominant mobile operating systems.

Symphony Teleca Corp., one of the companies working with Samsung and Intel Corp. to create apps for Tizen, displayed apps for basic features like music and social networking as well as calendar and Bible apps. They were all being tested on a mobile phone running on a 2.2 version of the Tizen OS.

“They won’t be pre-installed but these apps are already on the [Tizen] app store,” said Madhuri Athota, a senior engineer at Symphony Teleca who has been working on the Tizen project for about a year.

According to Ms. Athota, the Tizen app store is accessible to developers but has yet to be disclosed to the public.

“As soon as the device is launched, the app store will be made public,” she said, adding that her company is also “anxiously waiting” for the official launch of Tizen devices, which may happen early next year.

Samsung has long been working to develop an operating system that can serve as an alternative to Android, which had a dominant 81.3% market share in smartphones in the third quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple Inc.’s iOS held a 13.4% share.

For now, any advantage Tizen has over existing platforms appears to be more on the developers’ side of things than consumer experience. The Tizen operating system will allow developers to design apps with a simpler structure that can easily be converted for usage in devices that go beyond mobile devices, like television sets.

On the domestic front, all three South Korean telecom companies — SK Telecom Co., KT Corp. and LG Uplus Corp. — are official partners of the Tizen Association, which is in charge of marketing and commercialization of Tizen devices.

Samsung specifically asked for a Bible app that supports French and Russian, said Ms. Athota, indicating that Russia is also a target market for Tizen devices. Among foreign carriers, Vodafone Group, NTT Docomo Inc. and France’s Orange SA are partners of the Tizen project.